Word Document (draft of June 2008)
Mannequins
THAT AVIAN venture of my father’s was his last explosion of colourfulness, the magnificent last counter-march of fantasy that the incorrigible improviser, that fencing champion of the imagination, was to lead on the ramparts and trenches of a sterile and empty winter. Only today do I understand the lonely heroism with which he single-handedly gave battle against the boundless element of boredom numbing the town. Devoid of all support, without acknowledgement on our part, that astonishing man had defended the lost cause of poetry. He was a wonderful mill into whose hoppers the bran of the empty hours was poured, bursting into bloom in its mechanism with all the colours and aromas of oriental spices. But we, having grown accustomed to that metaphysical prestidigitator’s magnificent jugglery, had tended end p.26 to misapprehend the value of his sovereign magic which delivered us from the lethargy of our empty days and nights. Adela was given no reproach for her mindless and brusque vandalism. Quite the reverse, we felt a kind of base gratification, an appalling satisfaction in the curbing of those ebulliences, which we had avidly savoured to the full, only to withdraw perfidiously from our responsibility toward them. And in that treason there was perhaps even a secret prostration before victorious Adela, to whom we indistinctly ascribed some mission and a duty toward powers of a higher order. Father, betrayed by all, withdrew without a struggle from the sites of his recent glory. With no crossing of swords he surrendered the domains of his former magnificence into the hands of the enemy. A voluntary exile, he retreated to an empty room at the end of a hallway and entrenched himself there in solitude.
We forgot about him.
The mournful greyness of the town encircled us from all sides once more, the dark lichen of the dawns and the parasitic fungus of the dusks blossoming in the windows, and maturing into the downy fur of the long winter nights. The wallpaper in the rooms, blissfully unrestrained in the former days and receptive to the coloured flights of those winged assemblies, sank back into itself and grew tangled, winding up in the monotony of bitter monologues.
The lamps blackened and sagged like old teasels and musk thistles. They hung dejected and acrimonious now, quietly tinkling their glass crystals whenever anyone passed gropingly through the murk of the room. In vain, Adela inserted a coloured candle into every arm of those lamps, an ineffectual surrogate, a pale reminiscence of the magnificent illuminations with which their hanging gardens had so recently bloomed. Oh, where was that twittering budding, that rapid and fantastic fructification in the bouquets of those lamps, from which those winged phantasms had risen up as if from magical, parting layer cakes, splitting the air into magical packs of cards, scattering it into coloured rounds of applause, pouring out thick flakes, sky blue, peacock and parrot green, and metallic sparkles, drawing lines and arabesques in the air with the shimmering traces of their flights and wheels, unfurling coloured fans of flutters which hung long after the flight in the rich and spangled atmosphere? Even now the echoes and possibilities of colourful flares were hidden deep within the greyed air, but no one penetrated with a flute or tested with a drill the clouded grain of the air.
Those weeks stood under a banner of strange sleepiness.
Our beds — left unmade all day, their jumbles of bedclothes crumpled and dragged around in arduous sleep — were like richly cushioned boats made ready to sail out into the watery and convoluted labyrinths of some black, starless Venice. Adela brought us coffee in the hushed dawn. We dressed lazily in cold rooms, by the light of a candle mirrored many times over in the black panes of the windows. Those mornings were full of incoherent comings and goings, a protracted search in different drawers and wardrobes. The clacking of Adela’s slippers was heard all through the apartment. The shop assistants lit their lanterns, took the huge shop keys from Mother, and went out into the dense, swirling darkness. Mother could not organise her morning toilet. The candles died out in their sockets. Adela was lost somewhere in far removed rooms, or in the attic where she hung the washing. No amount of calling could summon her. In the stove, the still tentative, dull and dirty fire was licking the cold and shiny excrescences of soot in the throat of the chimney. The candle went out and the sitting room was plunged into darkness. With our heads on the tablecloth, amid the remnants of breakfast, we fell asleep, half dressed. Lying with our faces on the furry belly of the darkness we sailed away upon its undulating breathing, into starless nothingness. Adela’s noisy tidying awoke us. Mother could not decide what to wear. Before she had brushed her hair, the shop assistants had returned for dinner. The gloom in the market square took on a hue of aurous smoke. For a moment the colours of the most beautiful end p.28 p.29: ILLUSTRATION afternoon might have been unveiled from those smoky meads, those dull ambers. But the auspicious moment passed by; the amalgam of daybreak died — almost within reach, the rising ferment of the day fell back and returned to feeble greyness once more. We took our seats at the table; the shop assistants rubbed their hands, red from the cold, and their prosaic conversations at once gave rise the whole day — a grey and empty Tuesday, a day without tradition or face. But when a plate of fish in glassy aspic appeared on the table, two large fishes lying side by side, head to tail like the figure from the zodiac, we foresaw in them the coat of arms of that day, the calendar emblem of that nameless Tuesday, and we hastily shared it between ourselves, full of relief that the day had in this way regained its physiognomy.
The shop assistants consumed it with unction, with the solemnity of a calendar ceremony. The aroma of pepper spread over the room. And as they wiped the last of the jelly from their plates with pieces of bread, turning over in their minds the heraldry of the next few days of the week, and when only the heads remained on the dish, in the gelatine of their eyes, we all felt that the day had been conquered by our combined efforts, and its remains no longer came into our consideration.
Adela made no great ceremony over those remains, surrendered, in effect, to her mercy. Amid a clatter of pots and a swish of cold water, she energetically liquidated those few hours until dusk, which Mother slept through on the ottoman. Meanwhile, in the dining room, the evening’s scenery was being prepared. Polda and Paulina, the seamstresses, were arranging matters there with the apparatus of their craft. A taciturn, unmoving lady entered the room, carried on their shoulders — a great lady of straw and canvas with a black, wooden orb in place of a head. But once she had been placed in the corner, between the door and the stove, that silent lady became the mistress of the situation. From her corner, standing motionless, she supervised the girls’ work in silence. Full of criticism and disfavour she censured their pains and blandishments, in which they knelt before her, measuring fragments of cloth against her, end p.30 marked out with white basting thread. They attended with patience and concentration to the taciturn idol whom nothing could appease. That moloch* was as implacable as only female molochs can be, and she sent them back to work again over and over again, while they, as spindle-shaped and slender as the wooden spools from which they unwound their thread, and just as mobile, manoeuvred with deft movements over that heap of silk and wool; they cut their way into its colourful mass with clinking scissors; they set the sewing machine whirring, treading its pedal with a cheaply patent-leather booted foot, and a pile of off-cuts grew around them, shreds and tatters of different colours like husks and chaff spat out around a pair of fussy and extravagant parrots. The angled jaws of the scissors opened with a squeak, like the beaks of those colourful birds.
The girls trod incautiously over the colourful trimmings, wading indifferently as if in the debris of some potential carnival, the lumber rooms of some great unrealised masquerade. Laughing nervously, they shook off the tatters; they tickled the mirrors with their eyes. Their hearts and the quick sorcery of their hands were not in the boring dresses that lay on the table, but in those hundreds of fragments, those flippant and frivolous shavings with which they might shower the whole town, like coloured, fantastic snow. They suddenly felt hot; they opened the window in the impatience of their solitude, their hunger for unfamiliar faces, hoping at least to glimpse an anonymous face pressed against the glass. They fanned their flaming cheeks before the winter night swelling the curtains; full of rivalry and mutual detestation, they displayed their glowing décolletages, either of them prepared to put up a fight over that Pierrot which the night’s dark breeze might blow in through end p.31 the window. Ah, they demanded so little from reality! They held everything within themselves; they had a surfeit of all things within themselves. A Pierrot stuffed with sawdust would have sufficed for them, that word or two that they had been awaiting for so long, so that they might fall into their long-prepared role, stamped upon their lips long ago, a wild transport full of sweet and terrible bitterness, like the pages of a novel devoured in the night, tears flowing down their flushed cheeks.
My father, during one of his nocturnal wanderings about the apartment, hazarded in Adela’s absence, happened upon that quiet eventide assembly. He stood for a moment in the darkened doorway of an adjoining room, holding up a lamp, enchanted by that scene full of fervour and blushes, that idyll of face powder, coloured tissue-paper and atropine, which was underlain by the winter night breathing in the midst of the swelling curtains like a backdrop full of significance. In a few steps, putting on his spectacles, he approached the girls, and he strode around them, illuminating them with his upraised lamp. A draught from the open door lifted the curtains at the window; the young ladies, swaying their hips, allowed themselves to be seen, the enamel of their eyes twinkling along with the lacquer of their squeaking slippers and the clasps of their garters, under skirts swollen by the wind; tatters began to fly like rats across the floor, toward the half open door of the dark room, while my father, whispering in an undertone, scrutinised the snorting young ladies intently: ‘Genus avium... if I am not mistaken. Scansores or pistacci... noteworthy in the highest degree.’ end p.32
This chance encounter was to be the first of a whole series of gatherings, in the course of which my father enchanted both of those young ladies with the charm of his astonishing personality. In exchange for his chivalrous and witty conversation, which filled the emptiness of their evenings, the girls allowed him, the ardent scholar, to study the structure of their slender and tawdry bodies. This took place during the course of the lecture, with solemnity and refinement which relieved even the most daring points of those investigations of the equivocalness of their appearances. Pulling Paulina’s stocking from her knee, studying with enrapt eyes the compact and noble construction of its joint, my father said: ‘How full of charm and how favourable is the form of existence you ladies have assumed. How beautiful and simple is the thesis entrusted to you ladies, to reveal with your life. But with what mastery, with what finesse do you acquit yourselves of that task. Were I, casting aside respect before the Creator, to seek to jest in criticism of creation, then I should demand: “Less content and more form!” Oh, how that loss of content would unburden the world! More modesty in purposes, more restraint in claims, gentlemen demiurges, and the world would be more exquisite!’ cried my father as his hands were laying bare Paulina’s white calf from the fetters of her stocking. Just then, Adela, carrying a tray with an evening snack, paused in the open doorway from the dining room. This was the first meeting of the two enemy powers since the occasion of their great contest. We all who had been present at that encounter experienced a moment of tremendous fear. It was unutterably distressing for us to be witnesses to yet another humiliation of the already so deeply afflicted man. My father, greatly abashed, got up from his knees, his face tinged wave after wave with an ever darkening influx of shame. But Adela was found to be unexpectedly equal to the situation. Smiling, she strode up to Father and flipped his nose. At this end p.33 signal, Polda and Paulina clapped their hands with glee, stamped their feet, and danced Father around and around the table, hanging onto his arms at either side. In this way, thanks to the good-heartedness of the girls, the germ of an unpleasant conflict was dissipated in general gaiety.
Here begin the highly interesting and strange lectures that my father, inspired by the charm of that small and innocent audience, conducted in the succeeding weeks of that early winter.
It is worth noting how, in contact with that unusual man, all things retreated, as it were, to the root of their being, rebuilt their phenomenon down to the metaphysical core — they returned to their primordial idea, only to betray it at that point and lurch into those dubious, daring and equivocal regions which I shall here succinctly call the Regions of the Great Heresy. Our heresiarch walked like a mesmerist in the midst of things, infecting and seducing them with his dangerous charm. Am I also to call Paulina his victim? She became his pupil in those days, a disciple of his theory and the subject of his experiments.
I shall attempt to set out here, with due circumspection and avoiding scandal, that most heretical doctrine which possessed my father at that time, throughout the long months, and which governed all of his actions.
end p.34
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Notes
* That moloch: Moloch is a malevolent Old Testament deity, at one time associated with Baal. The worship of Moloch included human sacrifice, particularly of children, ordeals by fire, and self-mutilation. By extension (uncapitalised, as here), any terrifying figure. [RETURN]